


The Circle Cannot Hold (Boats and Birds)

by TheWrongKindOfPC



Category: Bandom, JJAMZ, The Like (Band)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 21:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3397730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWrongKindOfPC/pseuds/TheWrongKindOfPC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>17. Z/Tennessee - The owl and the pussycat went to sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Circle Cannot Hold (Boats and Birds)

**Author's Note:**

> There's a little mix that I put together for writing this story here: https://8tracks.com/anonposter/boats-and-birds

Once upon a time, there’s a little girl with drumbeats as bright as birds’ wings in her heart, and she belongs to two kingdoms.

(Well. One kingdom-turned-constitutional-monarchy and one republic, but you try explaining your country of origin’s imperial past and your country of choice’s imperial present to a three year old. Tennessee doesn’t blame her parents. Two kingdoms just _sounds_ better, and sound is in their blood, all of them.)

She wears lace whenever she can get her hands on it and picks up dirty, dust-drenched feathers when she finds them in the road or on the beach, and she threads them into her hair, and one day she meets Z Berg and it’s like falling in love with her own reflection in the mirror: a little embarrassing, doomed by mythology, and so completely and entirely untouchable that even just trying too hard is likely to end in sliced palms and broken glass.

“I think we sound pretty tight together,” Z says, and she meets Tennessee’s eyes over her drum kit that first day, which ought to be Tennessee’s first clue that Z’s sense of self-preservation leaves something to be desired.

…

 _A bird may love a fish, Signore,_ Drew Barrymore says from the TV screen in Tennessee’s parents’ bedroom, and she and Z shouldn’t be in here, really shouldn't be eating takeout in their bed, but Tennessee’s parents are out of town, and Z’s first time seeing _Ever After_ needs the big-screen experience. _But where would they live?_ Drew asks, all huge, tragic eyes and gently waving hair and Tennessee has never been so smitten. Drew’s tone is trying too hard for hopelessness, it gets stuck somewhere in the region of ‘yearning’ along the way, but Z seems unmoved.

She snaps her gum, leans forward from where she’s lying on her stomach, chin propped on her hands, feet kicked up at the knee behind her, ankles crossing and uncrossing around her mismatched socks. “In a boat, probably. Duh,” Z answers the movie like it’s obvious.

“Fish still can’t live _in_ boats,” Tennessee tells her, trying to filter at least a bit of her defensive outrage out of her tone because probably it sounds a little over the top as a reaction to a fairly light comment on a several-years-old, romantic-fluff movie. Still, “They drown in the _air_ , they’re only in boats when they’re being _murdered_.”

At this point, Tennessee has been a vegetarian for the past three years. Z won’t become one yet for another week and a half.

“Who says that’s not what I meant?” Z asks Tennessee, grin as bright as her teeth, and when she says it, it’s definitely a throw-away joke, nothing more to it than a breath’s worth of shock value.

…

Z says that, in the very particular case that is prom, the fact that they go to different high schools is a gift—all they have to do is both buy each other a ticket, and they both get two tries to get it right.

“Well, okay, but how much do we actually care about getting prom right?” Tennessee has to ask. She’s holding an absurd, gold velvet dress up against her body when she does, though, so she understands if her skepticism doesn’t sound entirely convincing.

“It’s a rite of passage,” Z says. “Just ask Cher.”

“As in ‘Sonny and-’?” Tennessee checks, just to clarify. She likes to think she gets it more often than most people, when Z gets it into her head to play reference-bingo, but even she hasn’t got anything like a 100 percent success rate.

Case in point, “No, as in _Clueless_ ,” Z says, which, really, Tennessee should have seen coming. “As in, my modern Emma, once more with attitude, as in Paul Rudd continues to be a babe.”

Which, right. Yeah, Tennessee should definitely have guessed.

“My girl knows all about rites of passage and the importance of buying into what’s important to your peer group, at least once in a while.”

Still, it’s Tennessee, and not Paul Rudd, who Z kisses under some stars, though not nearly as many as there would be at that time of night anywhere but the particularly habitated stretch of California coast where Z’s school’s rented prom-barge is cruising.

It’s their second prom, since the first—Tennessee’s and Charlotte’s, with Z tagging along like some kind of alien in their midst—had been, if not a failure, at least an anticlimax.

Z’s school’s prom is different somehow, though Tennessee doesn't know if that difference lies in the fact that she doesn’t actually know any of Z’s classmates, or if it’s the bizarro presence and existence of the boat, which is both impossible to leave before the official end of the prom and officially easy to find a cozy little hiding spot in.

They’re holed up away from the festivities, but it’s better that way. “James Dean would approve,” Z says, and Tennessee doesn’t have enough evidence to contradict her, despite her doubts that James Dean would have had much to say one way or another about the way they act at prom.

But then Z’s secret favorite terrible pop song comes on on the dance floor that they’re far from, and they can hear it from the distance that they’re keeping, faint but still infectious, and Z starts bopping around because the fact that she loves this song isn’t something she even tries to hide from Tennessee anymore, Tennessee is too close to her now to hide much from, and Tennessee decides, spur-of-the-moment as anything, that this is the moment to use that closeness to figure out the exact nature of this relationship she’s entangled herself straight into the middle of, so this is the moment where she leans forward and kisses Z’s mouth, and Z kisses back, which seems, at the time, to be at least a semi-definitive answer to the question of where Tennessee stands with her.

…

A band is not a boat, but it does the job for a while, and not even in the way where one of them drowns in the air. It’s really more than anyone should be able to ask of a conceptually fluid, metaphorical structure used to sustain what at the very least has always aspired to be a positive and genuine human connection, held together by the backbone of Z’s vision, Charlotte’s desire to be a star, and Tennessee’s compulsion to keep hearts beating any way she knows how.

Sometimes, Z dates boys.

And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that intrinsically—lots of people date boys, maybe even half the population—but the _way_ Z dates boys sometimes is a way that, Tennessee has a feeling, she is going to have to reach the end of her rope with at a certain point. She only has so much in her, and every new boy Z writes a song about seems to take a little away from the ‘so much’ that she has.

“Well I wouldn’t if you didn’t keep breaking up with me,” Z says once, which makes it seem like the breaking up is always all of Tennessee’s end, just because she’s the one who always makes herself say the words when they need to happen.

Z is an expert at pushing her till she gets there, though—ten years is definitely enough to build expertise in the field of emotional manipulation, whether it’s intentional or not. Ten years is enough to build a pattern. Z takes action, Tennessee forms a verbal reaction.

Continuing to love Z is a lot like loving America—they’re both big, all-consuming feelings Tennessee has complicated reactions and a degree of moral objection to, and yet she feels warmly and strongly enough that she’s willing to tie herself to both legally and financially to both for what feels like some degree of forever.

But then there’s Tokyo, and the end of The Like, and the end of Z’s faintly sweaty palm against Tennessee’s own at three o’clock in the morning for longer than they’ve gone without that since they met, back when liquid eyeliner was a new fad and the styles they refused to dress for included a distressing array of distressed denim.

Then there’s Tokyo and it may turn out not to be _the_ end, but it is certainly _an_ end, and a difficult one, too.

…

Tennessee thinks about getting all proprietary and strange about showing Z aroung The Deep End Club, since it is _her place_ , that strangely possessive feeling that springs up sometimes in direct opposition to memories of Z, but then, so much of New York is _hers_ by now, it hardly seems worth the trouble.

Besides, when Z steps out of the gate at the airport, all thoughts of spiky strangeness flit from Tennessee’s mind, and she’s left with just being glad to _see_ her.

…

_A bird may love a fish, but where would they live?_

That kind of question is only a problem, Tennessee thinks—years older and with any luck, worlds wiser—if you’re married to the idea of settling in just one place, and Tennessee was born to live in two worlds, she honestly doesn’t see any reason to cut that off.


End file.
